Sentences

June 7, 1987|By Charles Willeford

MY FIRST WIFE SPOILED ME, AS NEW brides are wont to do, by giving me a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice every morning with my breakfast.

I loved it. What is better in the morning than cold, freshly squeezed orange juice? True, there were always two or three orange seeds I had to fish out of the glass with a spoon before I could drink it, but who would complain about something so petty?

One afternoon, after I had been married for almost a year, I had a headache. The characters in the novel I was working on were no longer speaking to each other. There was no aspirin in the bathroom, so I rummaged around in the kitchen cabinets. I found a small tin aspirin box, but when I opened it I discovered 34 dry orange seeds.

I then looked in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator and found three small cans of frozen orange juice. What she had been doing, you see, was mixing the frozen juice in the kitchen, and then serving it to me after adding two or three seeds so that I would think I was drinking freshly squeezed juice.

Why did she do it? I don't know. There was no way that I could fathom her motivation. The deception was so trivial, so minor, I didn't know how to handle it. Should I confront her with my newly gained knowledge? And if I did, what purpose would it serve? Besides, it was partly my fault. I shouldn't have gone into her kitchen, her territory, in the first place.

No, I decided, the gentlemanly thing to do would be to continue on as if nothing had changed. I would keep on fishing those seeds out with my spoon each morning, and drinking my orange juice, made from frozen concentrate.

However, small seeds of suspicion had been planted. If, I thought, she would deceive me by putting dry seeds into frozen orange juice, perhaps there were other things as well? I started to check around . . . but that's another story. In time, my first wife became my ex-wife.

I told this little story at our regular poker game the other night. When I finished, there were appreciative, affirmative nods around the table. Another player cleared his throat and told this story:

''I went out with my present wife for almost three months before I found out that she was already married.

''Of course,'' he added virtuously, ''if I had known that she was married, I never would have dated her in the first place.

She had fooled him neatly. She would meet him at his office when he finished work for the day. Then they would go out to dinner, movies, motels and things like that.

But when he drove her home, she always made him drop her off a block away from her house. She lived with her mother, she explained, and her mother was dying of a terrible disease. Her mother was so ravaged by pain that she couldn't stand to have a stranger in the house. The explanation seemed reasonable, so he went along with it without concern.

Later on, he discovered that her mother had been dead for 18 years.

The deception could have continued indefinitely, but her husband found out about him. There was a messy, expensive divorce, and he had to pay her lawyer's fee. She also got custody of her two children when he married her after the divorce was final.

''She promptly had another baby with me,'' he concluded, ''so now I'm stuck with a deceitful wife and three ungrateful children to support.''

The poker game was forgotten as another player told his story of a woman's deceit. And another and another told his tale, each vignette more trenchant than the last.

Confession is good for the soul, but it ruined the poker. The game, which usually runs until midnight, broke up at 10 p.m. The married men in the game all quit and went home to check on their wives, to see what they were doing while they -- the husbands -- were out playing poker.

That left two of us, Ed Lewis, an accountant, and me, at the table, both bachelors, twice married, twice divorced: lonely, middle-aged men. We didn't say anything for a long time after the others left. We just sat there, drinking beer and trying to make interesting circle patterns on the felt- covered poker table with out damp cans of beer.

Finally, Ed said, ''Do you still drink orange juice every morning at breakfast?''